In the open world, various label sets and domain configurations give rise to a variety of Domain Adaptation (DA) setups, including closed-set, partial-set, open-set, and universal DA, as well as multi-source and multi-target DA. It is notable that existing DA methods are generally designed only for a specific setup, and may under-perform in setups they are not tailored to. This paper shifts the common paradigm of DA to Versatile Domain Adaptation (VDA), where one method can handle several different DA setups without any modification. Towards this goal, we first delve into a general inductive bias: class confusion, and then uncover that reducing such pairwise class confusion leads to significant transfer gains. With this insight, we propose one general class confusion loss (CC-Loss) to learn many setups. We estimate class confusion based only on classifier predictions and minimize the class confusion to enable accurate target predictions. Further, we improve the loss by enforcing the consistency of confusion matrices under different data augmentations to encourage its invariance to distribution perturbations. Experiments on 2D vision and 3D vision benchmarks show that the CC-Loss performs competitively in different mainstream DA setups.

Multimodal demonstrations provide robots with an abundance of information to make sense of the world. However, such abundance may not always lead to good performance when it comes to learning sensorimotor control policies from human demonstrations. Extraneous data modalities can lead to state over-specification, where the state contains modalities that are not only useless for decision-making but also can change data distribution across environments. State over-specification leads to issues such as the learned policy not generalizing outside of the training data distribution. In this work, we propose Masked Imitation Learning (MIL) to address state over-specification by selectively using informative modalities. Specifically, we design a masked policy network with a binary mask to block certain modalities. We develop a bi-level optimization algorithm that learns this mask to accurately filter over-specified modalities. We demonstrate empirically that MIL outperforms baseline algorithms in simulated domains and effectively recovers the environment-invariant modalities on a multimodal dataset collected on a real robot. Videos and supplemental details are at: https://tinyurl.com/masked-il

Domain adaptation targets at knowledge acquisition and dissemination from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain under distribution shift. Still, the common requirement of identical class space shared across domains hinders applications of domain adaptation to partial-set domains. Recent advances show that deep pre-trained models of large scale endow rich knowledge to tackle diverse downstream tasks of small scale. Thus, there is a strong incentive to adapt models from large-scale domains to small-scale domains. This paper introduces Partial Domain Adaptation (PDA), a learning paradigm that relaxes the identical class space assumption to that the source class space subsumes the target class space. First, we present a theoretical analysis of partial domain adaptation, which uncovers the importance of estimating the transferable probability of each class and each instance across domains. Then, we propose Selective Adversarial Network (SAN and SAN++) with a bi-level selection strategy and an adversarial adaptation mechanism. The bi-level selection strategy up-weighs each class and each instance simultaneously for source supervised training, target self-training, and source-target adversarial adaptation through the transferable probability estimated alternately by the model. Experiments on standard partial-set datasets and more challenging tasks with superclasses show that SAN++ outperforms several domain adaptation methods.

Few-shot learning aims to fast adapt a deep model from a few examples. While pre-training and meta-training can create deep models powerful for few-shot generalization, we find that pre-training and meta-training focus respectively on cross-domain transferability and cross-task transferability, which restricts their data efficiency in the entangled settings of domain shift and task shift. We thus propose the Omni-Training framework to seamlessly bridge pre-training and meta-training for data-efficient few-shot learning. Our first contribution is a tri-flow Omni-Net architecture. Besides the joint representation flow, Omni-Net introduces two parallel flows for pre-training and meta-training, responsible for improving domain transferability and task transferability respectively. Omni-Net further coordinates the parallel flows by routing their representations via the joint-flow, enabling knowledge transfer across flows. Our second contribution is the Omni-Loss, which introduces a self-distillation strategy separately on the pre-training and meta-training objectives for boosting knowledge transfer throughout different training stages. Omni-Training is a general framework to accommodate many existing algorithms. Evaluations justify that our single framework consistently and clearly outperforms the individual state-of-the-art methods on both cross-task and cross-domain settings in a variety of classification, regression and reinforcement learning problems.

Multi-agent interactions are important to model for forecasting other agents' behaviors and trajectories. At a certain time, to forecast a reasonable future trajectory, each agent needs to pay attention to the interactions with only a small group of most relevant agents instead of unnecessarily paying attention to all the other agents. However, existing attention modeling works ignore that human attention in driving does not change rapidly, and may introduce fluctuating attention across time steps. In this paper, we formulate an attention model for multi-agent interactions based on a total variation temporal smoothness prior and propose a trajectory prediction architecture that leverages the knowledge of these attended interactions. We demonstrate how the total variation attention prior along with the new sequence prediction loss terms leads to smoother attention and more sample-efficient learning of multi-agent trajectory prediction, and show its advantages in terms of prediction accuracy by comparing it with the state-of-the-art approaches on both synthetic and naturalistic driving data. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm for trajectory prediction on the INTERACTION dataset on our website11https://sites.google.com/view/smoothness-attention.

Existing learning from demonstration algorithms usually assume access to expert demonstrations. However, this assumption is limiting in many real-world applications since the collected demonstrations may be suboptimal or even consist of failure cases. We therefore study the problem of learning from imperfect demonstrations by learning a confidence predictor. Specifically, we rely on demonstrations along with their confidence values from a different correspondent environment (source environment) to learn a confidence predictor for the environment we aim to learn a policy in (target environment-where we only have unlabeled demonstrations). We learn a common latent space through adversarial distribution matching of multi-length partial trajectories to enable the transfer of confidence across source and target environments. The learned confidence reweights the demonstrations to enable learning more from informative demonstrations and discarding the irrelevant ones. Our experiments in three simulated environments and a real robot reaching task demonstrate that our approach learns a policy with the highest expected return. We show the videos of our experiments on our website.

Correspondence learning is a fundamental problem in robotics, which aims to learn a mapping between state, action pairs of agents of different dynamics or embodiments. However, current correspondence learning methods either leverage strictly paired data-which are often difficult to collect-or learn in an unsupervised fashion from unpaired data using regularization techniques such as cycle-consistency-which suffer from severe misalignment issues. We propose a weakly supervised correspondence learning approach that trades off between strong supervision over strictly paired data and unsupervised learning with a regularizer over unpaired data. Our idea is to leverage two types of weak supervision: i) temporal ordering of states and actions to reduce the compounding error, and ii) paired abstractions, instead of paired data, to alleviate the misalignment problem and learn a more accurate correspondence. The two types of weak supervision are easy to access in real-world applications, which simultaneously reduces the high cost of annotating strictly paired data and improves the quality of the learned correspondence. We show the videos of the experiments on our website.

Transfer learning aims to leverage knowledge from pre-trained models to benefit the target task. Prior transfer learning work mainly transfers from a single model. However, with the emergence of deep models pre-trained from different resources, model hubs consisting of diverse models with various architectures, pre-trained datasets and learning paradigms are available. Directly applying single-model transfer learning methods to each model wastes the abundant knowledge of the model hub and suffers from high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a Hub-Pathway framework to enable knowledge transfer from a model hub. The framework generates data-dependent pathway weights, based on which we assign the pathway routes at the input level to decide which pre-trained models are activated and passed through, and then set the pathway aggregation at the output level to aggregate the knowledge from different models to make predictions. The proposed framework can be trained end-to-end with the target task-specific loss, where it learns to explore better pathway configurations and exploit the knowledge in pre-trained models for each target datum. We utilize a noisy pathway generator and design an exploration loss to further explore different pathways throughout the model hub. To fully exploit the knowledge in pre-trained models, each model is further trained by specific data that activate it, which ensures its performance and enhances knowledge transfer. Experiment results on computer vision and reinforcement learning tasks demonstrate that the proposed Hub-Pathway framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance for model hub transfer learning.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables transferring knowledge from a related source domain to a fully unlabeled target domain. Despite the significant advances in UDA, the performance gap remains quite large between UDA and supervised learning with fully labeled target data. Active domain adaptation (ADA) mitigates the gap under minimal annotation cost by selecting a small quota of target samples to annotate and incorporating them into training. Due to the domain shift, the query selection criteria of prior active learning methods may be ineffective to select the most informative target samples for annotation. In this paper, we propose Transferable Query Selection (TQS), which selects the most informative samples under domain shift by an ensemble of three new criteria: transferable committee, transferable uncertainty, and transferable domainness. We further develop a randomized selection algorithm to enhance the diversity of the selected samples. Experiments show that TQS remarkably outperforms previous UDA and ADA methods on several domain adaptation datasets. Deeper analyses demonstrate that TQS can select the most informative target samples under the domain shift.

Deep learning techniques for point clouds have achieved strong performance on a range of 3D vision tasks. However, it is costly to annotate large-scale point sets, making it critical to learn generalizable representations that can transfer well across different point sets. In this paper, we study a new problem of 3D Domain Generalization (3DDG) with the goal to generalize the model to other unseen domains of point clouds without any access to them in the training process. It is a challenging problem due to the substantial geometry shift from simulated to real data, such that most existing 3D models underperform due to overfitting the complete geometries in the source domain. We propose to tackle this problem via MetaSets, which meta-learns point cloud representations from a group of classification tasks on carefully-designed transformed point sets containing specific geometry priors. The learned representations are more generalizable to various unseen domains of different geometries. We design two benchmarks for Sim-to-Real transfer of 3D point clouds. Experimental results show that MetaSets outperforms existing 3D deep learning methods by large margins.

Leveraging datasets available to learn a model with high generalization ability to unseen domains is important for computer vision, especially when the unseen domain’s annotated data are unavailable. We study a novel and practical problem of Open Domain Generalization (OpenDG), which learns from different source domains to achieve high performance on an unknown target domain, where the distributions and label sets of each individual source domain and the target domain can be different. The problem can be generally applied to diverse source domains and widely applicable to real-world applications. We propose a Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning framework to learn open-domain generalizable representations. We augment domains on both feature-level by a new Dirichlet mixup and label-level by distilled soft-labeling, which complements each domain with missing classes and other domain knowledge. We conduct meta-learning over domains by designing new meta-learning tasks and losses to preserve domain unique knowledge and generalize knowledge across domains simultaneously. Experiment results on various multi-domain datasets demonstrate that the proposed Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning (DAML) outperforms prior methods for unseen domain recognition.

With the development of deep networks on various large-scale datasets, a large zoo of pretrained models are available. When transferring from a model zoo, applying classic single-model-based transfer learning methods to each source model suffers from high computational cost and cannot fully utilize the rich knowledge in the zoo. We propose \emph{Zoo-Tuning} to address these challenges, which learns to adaptively transfer the parameters of pretrained models to the target task. With the learnable channel alignment layer and adaptive aggregation layer, Zoo-Tuning \emph{adaptively aggregates channel aligned pretrained parameters to derive the target model}, which simultaneously promotes knowledge transfer and adapts source models to downstream tasks. The adaptive aggregation substantially reduces the computation cost at both training and inference. We further propose lite Zoo-Tuning with the temporal ensemble of batch average gating values to reduce the storage cost at the inference time. We evaluate our approach on a variety of tasks, including reinforcement learning, image classification, and facial landmark detection. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive transfer learning approach can more effectively and efficiently transfer knowledge from a zoo of models.

Most existing imitation learning approaches assume the demonstrations are drawn from experts who are optimal, but relaxing this assumption enables us to use a wider range of data. Standard imitation learning may learn a suboptimal policy from demonstrations with varying optimality. Prior works use confidence scores or rankings to capture beneficial information from demonstrations with varying optimality, but they suffer from many limitations, e.g., manually annotated confidence scores or high average optimality of demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a general framework to learn from demonstrations with varying optimality that jointly learns the confidence score and a well-performing policy. Our approach, Confidence-Aware Imitation Learning (CAIL) learns a well-performing policy from confidence-reweighted demonstrations, while using an outer loss to track the performance of our model and to learn the confidence. We provide theoretical guarantees on the convergence of CAIL and evaluate its performance in both simulated and real robot experiments.Our results show that CAIL significantly outperforms other imitation learning methods from demonstrations with varying optimality. We further show that even without access to any optimal demonstrations, CAIL can still learn a successful policy, and outperforms prior work.

Given datasets from multiple domains, a key challenge is to efficiently exploit these data sources for modeling a target domain. Variants of this problem have been studied in many contexts, such as cross-domain translation and domain adaptation. We propose AlignFlow, a generative modeling framework that models each domain via a normalizing flow. The use of normalizing flows allows for a) flexibility in specifying learning objectives via adversarial training, maximum likelihood estimation, or a hybrid of the two methods; and b) learning and exact inference of a shared representation in the latent space of the generative model. We derive a uniform set of conditions under which AlignFlow is marginally-consistent for the different learning objectives. Furthermore, we show that AlignFlow guarantees exact cycle consistency in mapping datapoints from a source domain to target and back to the source domain. Empirically, AlignFlow outperforms relevant baselines on image-to-image translation and unsupervised domain adaptation and can be used to simultaneously interpolate across the various domains using the learned representation.

Action recognition has been a widely studied topic with a heavy focus on supervised learning involving sufficient labeled videos. However, the problem of cross-domain action recognition, where training and testing videos are drawn from different underlying distributions, remains largely under-explored. Previous methods directly employ techniques for cross-domain image recognition, which tend to suffer from the severe temporal misalignment problem. This paper proposes a Temporal Co-attention Network (TCoN), which matches the distributions of temporally aligned action features between source and target domains using a novel cross-domain co-attention mechanism. Experimental results on three cross-domain action recognition datasets demonstrate that TCoN improves both previous single-domain and cross-domain methods significantly under the cross-domain setting.

Difficulty in collecting and annotating large-scale video data raises a growing interest in learning models which can recognize novel classes with only a few training examples. In this paper, we propose the Ordered Temporal Alignment Module (OTAM), a novel few-shot learning framework that can learn to classify a previously unseen video. While most previous work neglects long-term temporal ordering information, our proposed model explicitly leverages the temporal ordering information in video data through ordered temporal alignment. This leads to strong data-efficiency for few-shot learning. In concrete, our proposed pipeline learns a deep distance measurement of the query video with respect to novel class proxies over its alignment path. We adopt an episode-based training scheme and directly optimize the few-shot learning objective. We evaluate OTAM on two challenging real-world datasets, Kinetics and Something-Something-V2, and show that our model leads to significant improvement of few-shot video classification over a wide range of competitive baselines and outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks by a large margin.

Visual perception entails solving a wide set of tasks (e.g., object detection, depth estimation, etc). The predictions made for different tasks out of one image are not independent, and therefore, are expected to be 'consistent'. We propose a flexible and fully computational framework for learning while enforcing Cross-Task Consistency (X-TAC). The proposed formulation is based on 'inference path invariance' over an arbitrary graph of prediction domains. We observe that learning with cross-task consistency leads to more accurate predictions, better generalization to out-of-distribution samples, and improved sample efficiency. This framework also leads to a powerful unsupervised quantity, called 'Consistency Energy, based on measuring the intrinsic consistency of the system. Consistency Energy well correlates with the supervised error (r=0.67), thus it can be employed as an unsupervised robustness metric as well as for detection of out-of-distribution inputs (AUC=0.99). The evaluations were performed on multiple datasets, including Taskonomy, Replica, CocoDoom, and ApolloScape.

Domain adaptation aims to leverage the supervision signal of source domain to obtain an accurate model for target domain, where the labels are not available. To leverage and adapt the label information from source domain, most existing methods employ a feature extracting function and match the marginal distributions of source and target domains in a shared feature space. In this paper, from the perspective of information theory, we show that representation matching is actually an insufficient constraint on the feature space for obtaining a model with good generalization performance in target domain. We then propose variational bottleneck domain adaptation (VBDA), a new domain adaptation method which improves feature transferability by explicitly enforcing the feature extractor to ignore the task-irrelevant factors and focus on the information that is essential to the task of interest for both source and target domains. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that VBDA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three domain adaptation benchmark datasets.

Domain adaptation improves a target task by knowledge transfer from a source domain with rich annotations. It is not uncommon that “source-domain engineering” becomes a cumbersome process in domain adaptation: the high-quality source domains highly related to the target domain are hardly available. Thus, weakly-supervised domain adaptation has been introduced to address this difficulty, where we can tolerate the source domain with noises in labels, features, or both. As such, for a particular target task, we simply collect the source domain with coarse labeling or corrupted data. In this paper, we try to address two entangled challenges of weaklysupervised domain adaptation: sample noises of the source domain and distribution shift across domains. To disentangle these challenges, a Transferable Curriculum Learning (TCL) approach is proposed to train the deep networks, guided by a transferable curriculum informing which of the source examples are noiseless and transferable. The approach enhances positive transfer from clean source examples to the target and mitigates negative transfer of noisy source examples. A thorough evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on weakly-supervised domain adaptation tasks.

Domain adaptation is critical for learning in new and unseen environments. With domain adversarial training, deep networks can learn disentangled and transferable features that effectively diminish the dataset shift between the source and target domains for knowledge transfer. In the era of Big Data, large-scale labeled datasets are readily available, stimulating the interest in partial domain adaptation (PDA), which transfers a recognizer from a large labeled domain to a small unlabeled domain. It extends standard domain adaptation to the scenario where target labels are only a subset of source labels. Under the condition that target labels are unknown, the key challenges of PDA are how to transfer relevant examples in the shared classes to promote positive transfer and how to ignore irrelevant ones in the source domain to mitigate negative transfer. In this work, we propose a unified approach to PDA, Example Transfer Network (ETN), which jointly learns domain-invariant representations across domains and a progressive weighting scheme to quantify the transferability of source examples. A thorough evaluation on several benchmark datasets shows that ETN consistently achieves state-of-the-art results for various partial domain adaptation tasks.

Domain adaptation has become a resounding success in leveraging labeled data from a source domain to learn an accurate classifier for an unlabeled target domain. When deployed in the wild, the target domain usually contains unknown classes that are not observed in the source domain. Such setting is termed Open Set Domain Adaptation (OSDA). While several methods have been proposed to address OSDA, none of them takes into account the openness of the target domain, which is measured by the proportion of unknown classes in all target classes. Openness is a critical point in open set domain adaptation and exerts a significant impact on performance. In addition, current work aligns the entire target domain with the source domain without excluding unknown samples, which may give rise to negative transfer due to the mismatch between unknown and known classes. To this end, this paper presents Separate to Adapt (STA), an end-to-end approach to open set domain adaptation. The approach adopts a coarse-to-fine weighting mechanism to progressively separate the samples of unknown and known classes, and simultaneously weigh their importance on feature distribution alignment. Our approach allows openness-robust open set domain adaptation, which can be adaptive to a variety of openness in the target domain. We evaluate STA on several benchmark datasets of various openness levels. Results verify that STA significantly outperforms previous methods.

Domain adaptation aims to transfer knowledge in the presence of the domain gap. Existing domain adaptation methods rely on rich prior knowledge about the relationship between the label sets of source and target domains, which greatly limits their application in the wild. This paper introduces Universal Domain Adaptation (UDA) that requires no prior knowledge on the label sets. For a given source label set and a target label set, they may contain a common label set and hold a private label set respectively, bringing up an additional category gap. UDA requires a model to either (1) classify the target sample correctly if it is associated with a label in the common label set, or (2) mark it as ``unknown'' otherwise. More importantly, a UDA model should work stably against a wide spectrum of commonness (the proportion of the common label set over the complete label set) so that it can handle real-world problems with unknown target label sets. To solve the universal domain adaptation problem, we propose Universal Adaptation Network (UAN). It quantifies sample-level transferability to discover the common label set and the label sets private to each domain, thereby promoting the adaptation in the automatically discovered common label set and recognizing the ``unknown'' samples successfully. A thorough evaluation shows that UAN outperforms the state of the art closed set, partial and open set domain adaptation methods in the novel UDA setting.

Domain adaptation studies learning algorithms that generalize across source domains and target domains that exhibit different distributions. Recent studies reveal that deep neural networks can learn transferable features that generalize well to similar novel tasks. However, as deep features eventually transition from general to specific along the network, feature transferability drops significantly in higher task-specific layers with increasing domain discrepancy. To formally reduce the effects of this discrepancy and enhance feature transferability in task-specific layers, we develop a novel framework for deep adaptation networks that extends deep convolutional neural networks to domain adaptation problems. The framework embeds the deep features of all task-specific layers into reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs) and optimally matches different domain distributions. The deep features are made more transferable by exploiting low-density separation of target-unlabeled data in very deep architectures, while the domain discrepancy is further reduced via the use of multiple kernel learning that enhances the statistical power of kernel embedding matching. The overall framework is cast in a minimax game setting. Extensive empirical evidence shows that the proposed networks yield state-of-the-art results on standard visual domain-adaptation benchmarks.

Hashing is widely applied to large-scale image retrieval due to the storage and retrieval efficiency. Existing work on deep hashing assumes that the database in the target domain is identically distributed with the training set in the source domain. This paper relaxes this assumption to a transfer retrieval setting, which allows the database and the training set to come from different but relevant domains. However, the transfer retrieval setting will introduce two technical difficulties: first, the hash model trained on the source domain cannot work well on the target domain due to the large distribution gap; second, the domain gap makes it difficult to concentrate the database points to be within a small Hamming ball. As a consequence, transfer retrieval performance within Hamming Radius 2 degrades significantly in existing hashing methods. This paper presents Transfer Adversarial Hashing (TAH), a new hybrid deep architecture that incorporates a pairwise t-distribution cross-entropy loss to learn concentrated hash codes and an adversarial network to align the data distributions between the source and target domains. TAH can generate compact transfer hash codes for efficient image retrieval on both source and target domains. Comprehensive experiments validate that TAH yields state of the art Hamming space retrieval performance on standard datasets.

Recent advances in deep domain adaptation reveal that adversarial learning can be embedded into deep networks to learn transferable features that reduce distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains. Existing domain adversarial adaptation methods based on single domain discriminator only align the source and target data distributions without exploiting the complex multimode structures. In this paper, we present a multi-adversarial domain adaptation (MADA) approach, which captures multimode structures to enable fine-grained alignment of different data distributions based on multiple domain discriminators. The adaptation can be achieved by stochastic gradient descent with the gradients computed by back-propagation in linear-time. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the proposed model outperforms state of the art methods on standard domain adaptation datasets.

Adversarial learning has been successfully embedded into deep networks to learn transferable features, which reduce distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains. Existing domain adversarial networks assume fully shared label space across domains. In the presence of big data, there is strong motivation of transferring both classification and representation models from existing large-scale domains to unknown small-scale domains. This paper introduces partial transfer learning, which relaxes the shared label space assumption to that the target label space is only a subspace of the source label space. Previous methods typically match the whole source domain to the target domain, which are prone to negative transfer for the partial transfer problem. We present Selective Adversarial Network (SAN), which simultaneously circumvents negative transfer by selecting out the outlier source classes and promotes positive transfer by maximally matching the data distributions in the shared label space. Experiments demonstrate that our models exceed state-of-the-art results for partial transfer learning tasks on several benchmark datasets.

Deep hashing enables image retrieval by end-to-end learning of deep representations and hash codes from training data with pairwise similarity information. Subject to the distribution skewness underlying the similarity information, most existing deep hashing methods may underperform for imbalanced data due to misspecified loss functions. This paper presents Deep Priority Hashing (DPH), an end-to-end architecture that generates compact and balanced hash codes in a Bayesian learning framework. The main idea is to reshape the standard cross-entropy loss for similarity-preserving learning such that it down-weighs the loss associated to highly-confident pairs. This idea leads to a novel priority cross-entropy loss, which prioritizes the training on uncertain pairs over confident pairs. Also, we propose another priority quantization loss, which prioritizes hard-to-quantize examples for generation of nearly lossless hash codes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DPH can generate high-quality hash codes and yield state-of-the-art image retrieval results on three datasets, ImageNet, NUS-WIDE, and MS-COCO.

Adversarial learning has been embedded into deep networks to learn disentangled and transferable representations for domain adaptation. Existing adversarial domain adaptation methods may struggle to align different domains of multimodal distributions that are native in classification problems. In this paper, we present conditional adversarial domain adaptation, a principled framework that conditions the adversarial adaptation models on discriminative information conveyed in the classifier predictions. Conditional domain adversarial networks (CDANs) are designed with two novel conditioning strategies: multilinear conditioning that captures the cross-covariance between feature representations and classifier predictions to improve the discriminability, and entropy conditioning that controls the uncertainty of classifier predictions to guarantee the transferability. Experiments testify that the proposed approach exceeds the state-of-the-art results on five benchmark datasets.

In this paper, we introduce a new method for classifying 3D objects. Our main idea is to project a 3D object onto a spherical domain centered around its barycenter and develop neural network to classify the spherical projection. We introduce two complementary projections. The first captures depth variations of a 3D object, and the second captures contour-information viewed from different angles. Spherical projections combine key advantages of two main-stream 3D classification methods: image-based and 3D-based. Specifically, spherical projections are locally planar, allowing us to use massive image datasets (e.g, ImageNet) for pre-training. Also spherical projections are similar to voxel-based methods, as they encode complete information of a 3D object in a single neural network capturing dependencies across different views. Our novel network design can fully utilize these advantages. Experimental results on ModelNet40 and ShapeNetCore show that our method is superior to prior methods.

Hashing is widely applied to large-scale multimedia retrieval due to the storage and retrieval efficiency. Cross-modal hashing enables efficient retrieval of one modality from database relevant to a query of another modality. Existing work on cross-modal hashing assumes that heterogeneous relationship across modalities is available for learning to hash. This paper relaxes this strict assumption by only requiring heterogeneous relationship in some auxiliary dataset different from the query or database domain. We design a novel hybrid deep architecture, transitive hashing network (THN), to jointly learn cross-modal correlation from the auxiliary dataset, and align the data distributions of the auxiliary dataset with that of the query or database domain, which generates compact transitive hash codes for efficient cross-modal retrieval. Comprehensive empirical evidence validates that the proposed THN approach yields state of the art retrieval performance on standard multimedia benchmarks, i.e. NUS-WIDE and ImageNet-YahooQA.

Learning to hash has been widely applied to approximate nearest neighbor search for large-scale multimedia retrieval, due to its computation efficiency and retrieval quality. Deep learning to hash, which improves retrieval quality by end-to-end representation learning and hash encoding, has received increasing attention recently. Subject to the ill-posed gradient difficulty in the optimization with sign activations, existing deep learning to hash methods need to first learn continuous representations and then generate binary hash codes in a separated binarization step, which suffer from substantial loss of retrieval quality. This work presents HashNet, a novel deep architecture for deep learning to hash by continuation method with convergence guarantees, which learns exactly binary hash codes from imbalanced similarity data. The key idea is to attack the ill-posed gradient problem in optimizing deep networks with non-smooth binary activations by continuation method, in which we begin from learning an easier network with smoothed activation function and let it evolve during the training, until it eventually goes back to being the original, difficult to optimize, deep network with the sign activation function. Comprehensive empirical evidence shows that HashNet can generate exactly binary hash codes and yield state-of-the-art multimedia retrieval performance on standard benchmarks.

Deep networks trained on large-scale data can learn transferable features to promote learning multiple tasks. Since deep features eventually transition from general to specific along deep networks, a fundamental problem of multi-task learning is how to exploit the task relatedness underlying parameter tensors and improve feature transferability in the multiple task-specific layers. This paper presents Multilinear Relationship Networks (MRN) that discover the task relationships based on novel tensor normal priors over parameter tensors of multiple task-specific layers in deep convolutional networks. By jointly learning transferable features and multilinear relationships of tasks and features, MRN is able to alleviate the dilemma of negative-transfer in the feature layers and under-transfer in the classifier layer. Experiments show that MRN yields state-of-the-art results on three multi-task learning datasets.